Esterificación de Ácidos Orgánicos Grasos por medio de una destilación reactiva térmicamente acoplada Esterification of Fatty Organic Acids using Reactive Thermally Coupled Distillation

Resumen

Salvador Hernández*, Juan Ernesto Estrada-Pacheco, Juan Gabriel Segovia-Hernández, Héctor Hernández-Escoto

Due to increased energy demand and environmental concerns worldwide, important research is currently underway on biofuels and alternative energies, e.g., biodiesel, biomass, bioethanol. In the case of biodiesel, it has been reported that its production can be competitive with fossil diesel when the price of crude oil reaches USD 100 per barrel . This price has been reached. As a result, important process intensification polices have been taken into account in the design of new processes, due to reduction in oil reserves, and for minimization of carbon dioxide emissions and use of alternative energies. Attention has been paid to these important aspects in the process systems engineering area of chemical engineering. For example, in a chemical plant, energy consumption in a separation process such as distillation can be up to 40% of total consumption. As a result, researchers in the field of distillation are developing new configurations that can be capable of reducing both energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. One alternative that has been explored in detail is the use of thermally coupled distillation sequences that can achieve energy savings between 30 and 50 percent over conventional distillation sequences for the separation of some multicomponent mixtures. These energy savings have been predicted using steady state simulation and mathematical programming and their theoretical control properties and dynamic behavior have also been determined. Based on these studies, practical implementation of thermally coupled distillation sequences has been conducted using dividing wall columns (Figure 1).
Reactive distillation is considered to be the most representative intensification operation because it combines reactions and separation in a single process unit. As a result, thermally coupled distillation can be used to produce and separate biodiesel. This leads to an important process to produce biofuels using a complex distillation system that can reduce energy consumption, capital costs and carbon dioxide emissions. Thus, in this work, the production of biodiesel by esterification of methanol and lauric acid, catalyzed by sulphuric acid, is studied using a thermally coupled distillation sequence with a side rectifier.